As It Is Today

AS IT IS TODAY

I could speak of the cosmos,

The destinations of God.

But that thing is broken

And that one not running well.

The wallet on my dresser

Is like a brown and fat Thanksgiving bird,

Stuffed full with crumbs of plastic

And varied business cards,

With very little nourishment

For the bellies of our lives.

What we can call empty calories

In the parlance of the times.

Its appearance may look heavy,

But in subsistence it is lean.

I cannot fix the broken thing,

What if the other fails?

There is a foundation

Long poured and set in stone.

We cannot change the footings,

We can only trim the home.

I leave what went before

To the history it is made of

And hope the present situation

Doesn’t shake my destinies with God.

I’M DREAMING OF A WHITE HALLOWE’EN – WAIT A MINUTE!

I’M DREAMING OF A WHITE HALLOWE’EN – WAIT A MINUTE!

On Our Snow Storm Of October 29, 2011

Howling wind, falling leaf,

Chilling draft as motif;

Ghostly sheets the only white

To haunt day and night.

Not sleet and snow that fell,

Like a Winter Witch’s spell.

Each week on Sunday the Monkey Man gives a challenge to write a poem in only 160 characters. Like writing a tweet – it takes some doing to convey thought in so few words. Come join the fun! 

Friendship

Friendship, Akin-ship,

There’s been a lot of been-ship.

A lot of shipmates sailing together

Until the waves broke vessels down

And carried us through different sounds.

How many wrecks upon the shoals

Of opportunity and goals?

Once anchor-bound by a tether

Until this wave crashed, that one rose.

Ah, the different seas we chose.

Ahoy there, mate, crossing the bar,

We parted in the ports flung far;

At many harbors and much bad weather,

Washed ashore by ambition or pride,

It’s on such rocks old friendships died.

Now this old sailor home from the sea

Is grounded by age and apathy

Without a gull of matching feather.

We were too focused on our fishing trips

And missed the lighthouse to true friendships

Photo: “Crossing the Bar” by the author, 1969

For Gooseberry's Poetry Picnic October 9, 2011

Late that morning...

…she picked up the tray and carried it

(Breakfast time now well gone)

To the kitchen from the bed.

She scraped the plate with the clean fork

And left all in the sink

While she made a brief, brief call.

Walking down her lovely garden path,

She sat in the dirt in dressing gown,

To snip some flowers growing there.

In the distance the phone had rung,

But this task was enough for now.

They would too soon be here.

She heard them come, she heard them go,

She didn’t know just where she stood,

Dizzy in the whirl of the last day.

Holding Gladiolas in her hand,

Thinking she should make lunch perhaps;

But at the stroke of one the tears broke.

Something of a History of English Poetry from the Dark Ages to Today

We think of poetry as rhyme,

Similarity ending every line,

As if this was the will of God.

Yes, it’s true I see you nod.

But no it is not in the history of our talk.

Early erudite scribers did not end English

Verse with varied vocabulary

Of sounds of similarity

It probably was not from purity.

Spelling Old English was enough a task.

At some point some poet arrived

Who took a stab and rhyming tried,

But like here resulted in feeble rime

And left it ‘til Chaucer shuffled by.

Yes, similar syllables he did not eschew

Ah, Chaucer knew his way around a rime or two,

Perhaps his forms were his own and new,

As he spread his rhymes through and through

In complex patterns that ring true

To ears raised on the Romantic lines

From Byron, Keats and Shelley’s times.

Though I came to poetry through the proclivities of Poe,

Embracing the spacing of rhythm and rhyme

I’ve watched the full circle back to non-ringing ends,

Probably owing some knowing of Walt Whitman

And the blue-collar

Bellow and blast of Sandburg,

the dropping of propriety proper by cummings

Or the Howls of the Beats, Bukowski and such,

And a love of it all. In my life I have gathered,

If it communicated, rhyme or not hasn’t mattered.

World is Disconnected

Shakespeare said it first, but what the heck,

‘Tis commonly remembered from Steinbeck.

Still our very own winter of discontent

Has fell cold on our world of disconnect.

Yet under the ice this lava seethes,

Across the fields, across the heaths,

And I fear this hidden broiling froth

Will surely burst forth like boiling broth

And when it does we’ll all be burned.

For one thing certain man has never learned

To temper his greed or undeserved pride,

And on that fact many truths have died. 

Days Just After Ten Years Past

DAYS JUST AFTER TEN YEARS PAST

written 9/11/2011 

Strange was the air then that fall.

You’d hear an airplane drone,

Breaking the morning silent.

You’d look up and quiver some

Then bow your head in

Silent mourning.

Illustration: "Children - American" by the author.

Each week on Sunday the Monkey Man gives a challenge to write a poem in only 160 characters. Like writing a tweet – it takes some doing to convey thought in so few words. Come join the fun! 

Lady of the Shore

When you’ve been out in search of whales

Under the windy billowed sheets,

You dream of home and safe shores

Safe from the waves constant beats.

You go for days, for weeks, for months,

Until the hold is filled and full.

Water turns brackish, salty the meat,

And you live on hardtack and guell.

And at last in on the dim edge of night,

With tired body and fearful soul,

Your eyes search out the lady of light,

Where she stands beyond the shoal.

Up the mast, the call, “Her light”,

To guide you betwixt Hell and Heaven.

To a old salt home from the sea,

Lighthouses are alluring women.

Written September 7, 2011 for  Slam Week 9 at bluebellbooks. Com as inspired by the picture shown.

In the Colors

Move the colors.

But they stop and go,

Not red or green or yellow.

No, no, they flow where colors never go.

Some darker stolen

Painted skies from haunted worlds

And go away and go away

How I wish they’d go away.

But the colors stay

And they have a weight

Because they’re not a shade;

They’re not a ghost, a specter or a sigh

Of wispy hues at all.

Move the colors, make then change,

From dark and deep and deeper gray.

Make the colors

Give me back the sky

Of golden rays and lighter blues,

But be careful there if when they lift

That reality I fear within

Doesn’t fling the shattered palette

And blind me to the outside day.

Photo by the author

Bride

She comes all winter warmth

Swathed in clinging frost

And diaphanous gloom.

Her smile of frozen teeth

And her eyes of icy ponds

Send shivers through the room.

We think of death as skeletal,

Cowled with cloak of black

Hunched like some old farmer

Over his scythe and sack

To cut and carry us to our doom,

But no, death is not the groom.

Death comes dressed in marriage veil,

In a snow white bridal gown

With a long icicle train.

Our final vows are sealed by one

Who doesn’t steal, but stills our heart

With a lover’s kiss that ends all pain.

BRIDE the reorder reading by the author

It is suggested you scroll down and turn off my music before playing the video.

I am hoping this will work now on "Voices and Friends". Soundcloud burst and rained on my parade trying to use it for that purpose, even with Nancy trying to help me. So decided to go to the video route.

I am not sure why I picked this particular poem. Maybe because the poem was a troublemaker, too. One day I got this one line in my head and couldn't get rid of it: "She comes all winter warmth." I could seem to do anything with it either, except I kind of liked it. Finally, what we have here is what I came up with.

After chatting with nancy, I decided to record this in a graveyard and then realized I never saw any graveyards nearby. Where I grew up all the churches seemed to have a cemetery, but not so in my current neck of the woods. I finally located one and wandered back to these older stones. The folk in the house in the background were having a Labor day BBQ. It smelled good. I wonder what they thought of this strange guy kneeling behind a tombstone reading something? Probably thought I was praying.

Friendly Gatherings

When it was still early morning,

Came some in curiosity and some with needs.

Ah, I like this.

Me, too.

And they shared in the bounty of the seeds.

Over the season in the sunrise,

There is friendly gatherings a-twitter.

Ah, this is life.

Some flew

When in bound some unfamiliar critter.

But even the beast from the hedgerow

Was soon accepted at the table,

Among the feathers of many color and hue.

I wish I could belong to this congregation,

But as a human I am not able.

I can only watch from a concealed view.

The wrens rush in rapid flights for their ration,

While the grackles gather about the edges.

The mourning doves, in moving pairs,

Come early and earnestly ignore

The in and out swooping sparrows.

Blue Jays and Cardinals add brightness to the gang,

And a squirrel, switching his tail,

Peels a nut to the rhythmic caws of a crow.

In the hours before the sunset,

When the seasons are turning their collars to the cold,

Oh, how I wish

I could

Sprout wings and fly south with that friendly fold.

Beware of the Blob

In the dark, sticky recesses of our only such repertory.

In the flicker of the screen and the screams

Of some girls who sat not silent beyond

I, in utter fascination, watched the Universal uglies,

The makeup formed fantasies on the faces

Of Bela, Boris and Lon.

But in the lonely, looming dimness

Of my bedroom in the midnight minutes,

I cringed in fear and loathing reliving

Mummy, monster, bat and beast.

Would a vampire wing in through my window?

Would the Mummy unravel my restraints?

Would, oh horror of it all,

Frankenstein’s creature crash my hall,

Smash through my confines

and drown me in the sink

Like the flower and the child?

I had a few defenses against these imagining of mind.

What did they have in common

That could provide me escapes?

Slowness of step and ungainly gaits.

Why the Mummy moved like molasses

And the Monster stumbled in outsized shoes.

I could outrun both as if they walked in glue.

Oh yes, the Wolfman was quick,

But restrained by the moon.

And you get enough garlic and the ghastly Dracula

Will fall into a swoon.

Besides, I reasoned, in my bed and my room,

I dwelt safely in the center of the streets

Of our tiny, tidy town.

By the time these hobbling horrors hop from the gloom,

They would have satiated appetites and want no more of eats.

So safe in bed I’m found.

Until…

The Blob “glides across the floor,

Right through the door

And all around the wall…”

Not only would nothing stop it,

As it slid in through some crack,

It was never satisfied,

Eating its never-ending snack,

As it creeps,

As it leaps,

To a tune by Bacharach.

NOTE:  “The Blob” starring Steve McQueen came out in 1958. It was made by Valley Forge Films, which normally made religious films.  I saw The Blob on its first run at the Colonial Theater in Phoenixville, a somewhat bizarre situation watching a monster in a film eat the theater you are watching the film in.  Those who fled the theater and then ran into the diner must have been quite athletic. The theater is in Phoenixville and the Diner is in Downingtown, around 16 miles apart. I have also eaten in that diner.

It the scene from the film that I have inserted at the end of this poem also has meaning for me. The fireman dressed in white is Tom Ogden. More correctly, Reverend Thomas Ogden, who was my minister when I attended the Downingtown Methodist Church as a boy. He played the fire chief in the film.